Linux

Linus Torvalds has surprised everyone and launched Linux kernel 3.18 RC1 ahead of time. A new development cycle has started and it will take a few weeks to see what some of the major features added are.

Tails 1.2 is released and announced by Tails developers bring with new feature and improvement. As we know, Tails is a live linux distribution based on debian and focused to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

One of the most important changes in this release is tails 1.2 not included Iceweasel Internet browser and it replaced with Tor Browser, which is based on the latest 4.0 release and Firefox 31.2 ESR. Also, all the applications of tails 1.2 now confined with Apparmor. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.16.5-1, and VirtualBox guest additions should now work by default, improving the performance of the OS in a virtual machine.

So when I released 3.17, I said that I'd extend the merge window to
three weeks due to travel.

I clearly lied.

Because here we are, the usual two weeks later, and I've already
pushed out 3.18-rc1.

What happened is that not only did I merge actively despite travels -
I was out of communication just for a couple of days (almost, but not
entirely, due to flights - the hotel in DÃsseldorf lost all internet
for a day too). But perhaps more importantly, people seem to have
aggressively sent in their pull requests, because rc1 contains more
than linux-next did a couple of days after 3.17.. So holding it up
another week just seems pointless.

That said, I realize that people might have taken my statements at
face value, and planned with that in mind. I hate it when I get pull
requests really late in the merge window, but having closed it as per
the regular schedule, I also understand that somebody might have
planned on sending their pull request a bit later. It's ok. Grovel a
bit, and explain what's up, and you can almost certainly guilt me into
taking stuff.

Also, maybe I just missed something due to jetlag (hmm. yes, let's
call it "jetlag", that sounds so much better than "core incompetence
and bad planning"), so if you feel unfairly overlooked, send me a note
explaining how I've unfairly wronged you.

There is also at least one pull request that I am hoping to get asap
and planning on still pulling, ie I'm very much still hoping to get
overlayfs finally merged. But there were a few last-minute questions
from Al. Assuming that all works out, that's an expected late pull.
Not worth holding up the rc1 release for one known straggler, though.

So there you have it. The merge window is closed, but with room for
excuses and possible missed requests. As usual, the shortlog is much
too big to post (core stats: roughly 74% drivers, 10% architecture
updates, the rest networking, filesystems, core kernel, documentation,
include files, tool updates...), and the appended is my "mergelog"
which as usual credits the people I pulled from, which is not at all
necessarily the same as the people writing the code.

Whether you're customizing your Linux install or choosing a distro to go with, one of your many options is the desktop environment you use. There are tons to choose from, all with different benefits and features. There may be no one single best, but this week we're looking at five of them, based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week we asked you to tell us which Linux desktop environment was your favorite—mind you, we're talking about DEs, not distributions—and you replied with tons of great options, from the useful to the hilarious. Let's take a look at the five nominees that rose to the top, thanks to your votes, in no particular order:

IBM has made it pretty clear that it wants more Power Systems customers to adopt Linux for certain parts of their workloads in addition to selling more Power8 systems to customers with Linux workloads that might otherwise buy X86 systems. IBM's European unit is actually doing something about it to try to push Linux.

The Parsix operating system uses only the GNOME and Debian packages from the stable branches. The developers aim to provide a complete and bug free Linux distribution, at least as much as humanly possible. The fact that the OS is based on Debian "Wheezy" helps a lot, especially because it's now a Long Term release and it comes with all the latest security updates.

The developers seem to be follow a specific schedule and this latest version comes just a month after the previous Test. It's not clear just how many of these Testing releases will have, but it does look like the system is getting more stable.

4MLinux is one of the more unique Linux distributions available. The developers have obviously tried to get in as much as possible without taking up too much memory and disk space.

The 4 Ms stand for Maintenance, MiniServer, Multimedia and Mystery.

For maintenance purposes it would be adequate for rescue purposes but the hit and miss nature of trying establish a WIFI connection was worrying and I'm not sure whether the tools included are better than the tools included for other rescue disks.

Apple products are known to behave very unfriendly when they are simply connected to a PC or Mac OS X and they usually require iTunes or some surrogate to transfer files. Fortunately, on Ubuntu things are a little bit different and they are mounted as drives.

More in Tux Machines

Linux: To recurse or not

Linux and recursion are on very good speaking terms. In fact, a number of Linux command recurse without ever being asked while others have to be coaxed with just the right option. When is recursion most helpful and how can you use it to make your tasks easier? Let’s run through some useful examples and see.

today's leftovers

MX Linux Review of MX-17. MX-17 is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. It’s XFCE based, lightning fast, comes with both 32 and 64-bit CPU support…and the tools. Oh man, the tools available in this distro are both reminders of Mepis past and current tech found in modern distros.

Samsung stopped the distribution of the Android 8.0 Oreo operating system update for its Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones due to unexpected reboots reported by several users.
SamMobile reported the other day that Samsung halted all Android 8.0 Oreo rollouts for its Galaxy S8/S8+ series of Android smartphones after approximately a week since the initial release. But only today Samsung published a statement to inform user why it stopped the rollouts, and the cause appears to be related to a limited number of cases of unexpected reboots after installing the update.

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available.

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory.
The Vulkan Layer Factory aims to creating Vulkan layers easier by taking care of a lot of the boilerplate code for dealing with the initialization, etc. This framework also provides for "interceptor objects" for overriding functions pre/post API calls for Vulkan entry points of interest.